


Tell Me No More Make Believe

by Akaiba



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, M/M, Memory Loss, brain washing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 07:11:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1460449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akaiba/pseuds/Akaiba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt for profilerchic on Tumblr: "I don’t even care what you write, but can I just get a snip of when Steve confronts Bucky again. OR OR<br/>The Winter Soldier has been researching.. looking into who this man was that has garnered so much admiration from the man in blue, the one with sad eyes full of lost hope. He wants it to stop… the sadness. He doesn’t even know why..<br/>So he researches. He looks. Because the man is still his mission.. but with Hydra gone, maybe it can a different kind of mission.<br/>So he researches… But he doesn’t have to look very far."</p><p>The stucky isn't strong with this one but it is implied as would happen later, maybe happened before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me No More Make Believe

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me something beautiful,  
> Oh tell me something real,  
> Tell me no more make believe,  
> I just wanna feel,
> 
> Fill it full of horror,  
> Fill it full of life,  
> Fill it full of feeling,  
> There's more honesty in strife,
> 
> Title and lyrics come from the song Beautiful by Obsidia Ft. CoMa

The information shouldn’t be this easy to find, and in reality it isn’t- not the important things- but there’s something. A wealth of something that swallows him up and drags him down the shadows of forgotten hallways in his own mind to places he can’t reach. There’s always this tugging, frustrating familiarity that pulls at him with every picture, every fact.

The museums have the relics and the internet has the stories, both sharing a strange mix of the facts and he can tell truth from fabrication just from whether it pulls at his mind or not. Then… he isn’t sure he can trust his own mind.

He’s good at being a ghost, at being a shadow barely thought to double take at. He learns names, dates, specifics of missions. He pieces together a man that shares his face and nothing else and the longer he looks the more he learns about the other man. The man in blue. His mission.

Captain America, the world calls him.

It means nothing to him, even as it somehow means something. What resonates is the name Steve. It pulls at him, tugs him to staring at the ‘pre-serum’ pictures of that man they compare the idol to everywhere. There are varying degrees of marvel at the transformation of the experiment, all concluding Steve was a lucky man to be chosen and not stuck as that weak, barely ninety pound, frail thing.

He isn’t sure he agrees. The tiny little figure haunts him, pulls him deeper into avenues of his own mind as he flees and disappears every time Captain America finds him. He will not trade one cage for another and no matter the sealed away memories that pull at him he is not so addled as to trust this man that he thinks he knew.

In the photos he finds, the mirror of his own face is often at Captain America’s side. He sees them smile and laugh, he sees a light in both of them of goodness and friendship. He doesn’t even have a basis for these things, he just knows. He has the facts; he knows Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were life-long friends, but it isn’t that facts he sees. It’s the joyful face he sees in the crackled footage from a forgotten time in contrast to the snatches of a sad face he sees when he vanishes.

The sadness pulls at him harder every time he sees the forgotten happiness, the way his own face is pulled up into a crooked grin with an arm clapped around a man he should know. It makes him sloppy with a deliberateness he cannot excuse. He lingers where he shouldn’t, stares longer at the man he doesn’t know but feels like he should. He dreams of a run down apartment in Brooklyn, bare floorboards and flimsy walls, drafts he can’t stop and always the dread of winter because winter brings cold and Steve can’t handle the cold. He gets sick.

He wakes in cold sweats and splitting headaches, a name on the tip of his tongue that might have once been his or might be ‘Steve’. He never cries it out so he never hears and doesn’t trust his own mind to figure it out on his own.

It’s after one of these nightmares that he wakes to a creak of a floorboard outside his apartment. He’s in a derelict building in Brooklyn, retracing steps he might have walked in hopes of finding himself. The apartment has better glass in the windows and there’s a threadbare, filthy carpet on the floors but it’s… familiar.

There is no fighting this time. He just stands in the door way and when Steve enters, they just stare at each other. A thousand different things play across the familiar stranger’s face- his target- and all of them twist his gut and make him ache. “Stop that.” He snaps.

Steve blinks, swallowing in shock before he croaks out, “Stop what? Stop following you?”

"No, stop looking like that." He doesn’t even realise that he’s not told Steve to leave him alone, he told him ‘no’. Does he want Steve to keep following him? Will they run in circles forever? Each of them chasing shadows they can’t catch.

"Like what?"

"Sad."

Silence falls between them and Steve’s arm, the one holding the shield, lowers and he is so achingly vulnerable as he looks hopefully at him. He looks away but Steve seems to take this as invitation to look around the room. They warily walk around each other, almost civil after so many bloody fist fights where Steve never hit back and the Winter Soldier never quite meant it.

"You… you have asthma?" Steve says suddenly.

He gives the super soldier a confused, irritated look. “No.” He grunts by way of succinct answer. Steve is holding a stolen prescription of an inhaler and looking so misty eyed and sad, even as he seems touched beyond words and the Winter Soldier wants to shake him, wants to demand answers and drag the memories out of Steve’s mouth if they won’t come from his own mind.

"Do you… do you remember?" There’s so much hope there, so much desperation and it twists the Winter Soldier’s gut even as he grinds his teeth and his fingers clench into fists because he can’t ease that and he… he wants to.

"I don’t know." He admits softly. Steve nods, there’s still sadness and still hope and he has to ask. "Am I… am I Bucky?" Steve nods again, slower, like he’s scared that he’ll disappear if he scares him. The Winter Soldier has done many horrifically unspeakable things, the blood of so many staining his hands, enough blood to sink and drown in but this… this scares him. "I c-can’t… I can’t remember…!" He grunts, frustration curling into every word, tightening in his muscles and making him want to lash out and break things but he… he can’t do this again. Steve doesn’t ever fight back and more and more the Winter Soldier can’t raise his arm to hurt Steve.

It’s like an order he knows down to his core; do not hurt Steve, protect him. Protect Steve.

It’s like a mission, one woven into his soul that seems to override his mission. Steve is still his target but this is a mission of his own choosing and when Steve gently asks him to come with him the Winter Soldier can’t say no because he doesn’t want to. He wants to go with Steve and maybe be worthy of the looks Steve gives him, maybe earn his own looks like the ones Captain America used to give Bucky Barnes. They leave the apartment together, walking side by side down the street in the small hours of the morning, streets mostly empty of anyone brave enough to approach them and it feels familiar.

He might be Bucky after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I now have like separate feelings for The Winter Soldier and for Bucky and for the Winter Soldier as he slowly becomes Bucky again. Everything hurts.
> 
> My tumblr: http://akaiba.tumblr.com/


End file.
